QUENTIN LETTS sees Gove on top form

Many say Boris Johnson is the Leave campaign’s great asset. Boris is indeed a joy, a tremendous gooser of the electorate.

But it is bookish, bespectacled Michael Gove who presents the intellectual oomph and thereby provides essential reassurance to Centrist voters.

This he did yesterday with a wide-ranging, witheringly funny speech. Folks, it was a stonker.

He was funny, gripping – and as rude as English mustard

Many say Boris Johnson is the Leave campaign’s great asset. Boris is indeed a joy, a tremendous gooser of the electorate. But it is bookish, bespectacled Michael Gove who presents the intellectual oomph and thereby provides essential reassurance to Centrist voters, writes Quentin Letts

Many say Boris Johnson is the Leave campaign¿s great asset. Boris is indeed a joy, a tremendous gooser of the electorate. But it is bookish, bespectacled Michael Gove who presents the intellectual oomph and thereby provides essential reassurance to Centrist voters, writes Quentin Letts

Many say Boris Johnson is the Leave campaign’s great asset. Boris is indeed a joy, a tremendous gooser of the electorate. But it is bookish, bespectacled Michael Gove who presents the intellectual oomph and thereby provides essential reassurance to Centrist voters, writes Quentin Letts

This was the speech the out-ies needed after all that Government propaganda for Brussels. It neutralised claims by George Osborne and Co that Leave has no plan.

It was optimistic, internationalist, liberal. It was as rude as English mustard and beautifully written.

Watching my old friend perform under the TV lights – so hot they could have fried Spam, yet he kept cool – I was struck by how he has grown as a politician, even in the few short weeks since he ignored David Cameron and announced support for Leave.

He has acquired greater composure. He looked smart and his dark-rum voice was as comforting as Richard Baker in Nine O’Clock News days.

Asked questions afterwards, he knocked back answers like a Test cricketer untroubled in the nets. He managed to criticise Remain without descending to partisan rancour.

And he let slip a glimpse of his personal experience: his dad’s fish dealership in Aberdeen went out of business as a result of EU interference.

The venue was a horrid little room in the Leave campaign’s temporary offices, the second floor of an office block near Lambeth Palace.

It had a low ceiling and about 50 plastic chairs arranged for reporters and a few Leave campaign enthusiasts. Tory MP Michael Fabricant was there, as was Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler.
It had a low ceiling and about 50 plastic chairs arranged for reporters and a few Leave campaign enthusiasts. Tory MP Michael Fabricant (pictured) was there, as was Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler

It had a low ceiling and about 50 plastic chairs arranged for reporters and a few Leave campaign enthusiasts. Tory MP Michael Fabricant (pictured) was there, as was Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler

A camp little Osric in grey herringbone suit scuttled here and there. He was one of several in tweed. A man at the back had one of those hats worn by the pop group Madness.

It had a low ceiling and about 50 plastic chairs arranged for reporters and a few Leave campaign enthusiasts. Tory MP Michael Fabricant (pictured) was there, as was Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler

A woman who must have been at least 55 kept making older gents’ eyes boggle by leaning towards them with – forgive me – the most fantastic embonpoint.

How refreshingly individual, how much more fun, the Brexiteers are than those bland Europhiles.

Mr Gove’s language was similarly electric. Any speech which effortlessly juggles phrases such as ‘a priori justification’ and ‘EU trialogues’ with references to the Ottoman Empire, Catwoman, Dennis the Menace and (for the fashion-conscious) TV’s Game of Thrones, is unusual.

So few of today’s politicians keep you gripped. So many plod through speeches, droning away in cliched, clunky soundbites. Mr Gove let his prose cartwheel and sing.

May his linguistic flair chasten such dullards as Osborne and Hammond and May. He argued that the EU’s lack of democracy was as bad as that of the Habsburgs, the Russan tsars, Rome in its decline and the Ottomans in their final days.

He kept using the phrase ‘it’s a fact that…’. Thus ‘it’s a fact that youth unemployment in Spain is 45.3 per cent’ and ‘it’s a fact that not a single one of the world’s top 20 universities is in the eurozone’.

Then came prolonged mockery of the Project Fear drongos who insist Brexit would be a calamity. He did this with an impeccably straight face.

They claimed that if we left the EU ‘no Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France’. They claimed an alliance of Putin, Marine Le Pen and Trump would run amok – ‘like some geopolitical equivalent of the Penguin, Catwoman and the Joker’.

Govey deplored the pessimism of these repressive neck-clutchers.

They were spreading ‘a fantasy, a phantom, a great, grotesque, patronising and preposterous Peter Mandelsonian conceit that imagines the people of this country are mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night’.

I suspect several of his more cowardly Cabinet colleagues – those who have opted for Remain for careerist reasons rather than out of any true enthusiasm for the Brussels elite – will have heard Mr Gove’s wonderful, clement, liberating speech yesterday and felt a sting of shame and envy.